I still have my Daisy No. 25 pump BB gun from around 1960. Back then, I walked around with a friend who had one. I thought it was pretty powerful. We could break bottles, shoot through real cans, and knock things off wires.
Got it for Christmas. My mom was against it, and my dad was okay with it. My mom may have been right to an extent. While I remember having a lot of fun with it, my friends and I did some nasty things with our BB guns.
When we got older, we had BB gun fights. It may sound harsh, but it was the late 1950s or early to mid-’60s and living in a rural area may have influenced our BB gun battles. I looked it up. It turns out it wasn’t unusual.
As seen in the ad, BB guns were marketed straight to youngsters as the ultimate toy. They were our ticket to our cowboy and war fantasies fueled by Wild West and WWII themes from TV screens to movie theaters.
Safety? Parental hovering? Things were different then. The kids didn’t overrule our parents, but much of our playtime was outdoors without parental supervision. We used our BB guns as tools for wild, imaginative adventures, often roping their pals into mock shootouts. Remember, too, that we didn’t have phones to carry around. We played real games that required imagination and movement. We did so much running and biking our average BMI was 12, but we weren’t starving.
I’ll go out on a limb here but ask someone who lived it. They’ll tell tales, some tall, of pinging BBs at tin cans, makeshift targets, and even each other, usually with little more than our naivety for protection.
Risky? You bet! We had a rule of no shots above the waist, but from running and jumping, there were errant shots. Welts were badges of honor, and I suppose a rogue shot might clip an eye every now and then, but back then, it barely made the news; no one was rushing to slap rules on it.
The reality is that I only knew of one kid who shot his eye out, but with a .22 rifle. It seems we liked going to the dump to shoot rats. That line from A Christmas Story, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” sums it up perfectly in the sense that we knew the danger, but it was too much fun to resist.